Auctions are a mechanism used to buy and sell goods by offering a good for sale, taking offers from buyers to purchase the good, and determining a buyer with a winning offer. Auctions provide a process to competitively affect a purchase price of a product by, for example, raising a purchase price by placing increasingly higher bid prices until a highest bid is accepted for the product by the seller, in a forward auction. In a reverse auction, multiple sellers compete to sell a product to a buyer by bidding the purchase price of the product down to a price agreeable to the buyer.
Competition in driving down the purchase price is related to, for example, the number of sellers participating in the sale. The greater the number of sellers offering a product for sale increases a probability that the sellers will successively decrease the purchase price in order to win a sale while still realizing profit. A problem of traditional reverse auctions is accumulating enough sellers offering to sell identical goods in such a quantity to meaningfully decrease purchase prices.
Another problem of traditional reverse auctions is insufficient buyer aggregation. A dearth of bids associated with poor buyer aggregation makes selling products impractical because the sellers' profits are negligible without an adequate number of buyers placing upward pressure on an ultimate purchase price.
Overall, the examples herein of some prior or related systems and their associated limitations are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of existing or prior systems will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon reading the following Detailed Description.